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The artists competing to create public art to honor Nashville’s role in the civil rights movement include a sculptor who regularly celebrates social justice, a man who has sculpted one of the Tuskegee airmen and a woman who has crafted doves of peace outside a Shanghai hospital.

There’s also a man who has created figures of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and blues legend Muddy Waters, and a sculptor who built her own foundry and creates long human forms cast in bronze.

Those are the five finalists to create the Nashville civil rights work, which the Metro Arts Commission hopes will be completed and installed along Fifth Avenue North — near the old sites of lunch counter sit-in demonstrations — in a little more than a year.

Movement veterans and others will have a chance to influence what the artwork will say and signify at two public workshops the arts commission is hosting. The first is scheduled noon to 1:30 p.m. Thursday at the Nashville Public Library, 615 Church St.; the second is scheduled for 6 to 7:30 p.m. March 12 at the Looby Branch Library, 2301 Rosa L. Parks Blvd.

“We want to give the community an opportunity to voice their opinions on what’s important as far as the civil rights movement and maybe tell their personal stories and talk about what symbols they identify with and interpret to be important,” said Caroline Vincent, the arts commission’s public art manager.

“We really want the artists to respond to the broad themes of the Nashville civil rights movement, and we don’t have a preconceived notion of what that will be.”

The artists won’t be there to hear the stories firsthand, however. They made site visits earlier this year but won’t return for the workshops, Vincent said. Instead, commission staffers will “digest” what’s said at each meeting and pass it on to the artists.

Budget of $75,000

Jennifer Cole, the arts commission’s executive director, said the artist selected for the job will have a budget of $75,000, but installation and site preparation costs won’t be known until the final proposal is approved. Matthew Walker Jr., who participated in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides as a Fisk University student in the early 1960s, said Monday at a Tennessean forum on the civil rights movement that Metro’s plans are insignificant compared to what other cities have done to honor their activists.

Vincent said 82 artists responded to the commission’s national solicitation of interest. That was a typical turnout, she said, although it was one-third less than that for the job to create art for the Korean Veterans Boulevard roundabout near Music City Center, which drew about 130 submissions.

None of the five finalists is from Nashville, the state or even the South. But Cole said other cities routinely hire artists from throughout the country and all over the world.

“No public art collection in the world is made up solely of local artists,” she said. “You pick the best artist for the job, period.”

Artists' websites

Cole also cautioned against expecting the civil rights art to be similar to previous work by any of the finalists.

“Most of the work shown is from a direct private commission,” she said of the artists’ websites. “Someone hired one of these artists to create a specific person or event. In this call, artists are not being asked to create a specific person (or) event but to respond to the larger Nashville movement.”

The finalists and their websites are:

• Mario Chiodo, Oakland, Calif.: freedommarchofart.com/. Chiodo created a large sculpture in Oakland called “Remember Them,” which shows 25 humanitarians, from President Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy.

• Joel Randell, Edmond, Okla.: www.joelrandell.com/. Randell’s site features a sculpture of Tuskegee Airman Charles B. Hall and a life-size bronze statue of the Marquis de Lafayette, a Frenchman who fought alongside American troops in the Revolutionary War.